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Badlands: Deconstructing the myth of America
It’s easy to pinpoint nowadays the moment American cinema began to turn things around in terms of themes and subject matters, when filmmakers let loose their anger and frustration at society as a whole with movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider re-inventing the gangster and western genre and adapting it to the times […]
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The Hand of God: Paolo Sorrentino celebrates family, cinema and perseverance
Movies can save you. They certainly saved Paolo Sorrentino, the Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker of The Great Beauty. In his latest film, The Hand of God, Sorrentino confronts his own past, a past tied to the city of Naples, Diego Armando Maradona and cinema. For a director whose movies have often revolved around vast themes such […]
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Before Sunset: A recipe for the perfect sequel
When telling the continuation of a story, movies often find themselves in the awkward position of having to cover all over again past events for those that may not have seen the previous chapter, and simultaneously drive the actual story forward. The whole endeavor can be problematic: juggling too many storylines, subplots and characters tends […]
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About Elly: How mundanity turns into a nightmare
Scary season is upon us, that time of the year when people enjoy being spooked by their favorite movies. Personally, this time around I decided to revisit a film that stopped me in my tracks after first viewing it. It gave me chills despite being a regular drama about regular people. Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly […]
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Affliction: Paul Schrader and the violence we inherit
Paul Schrader, the man who’s been fighting the Hollywood system ever since he got his hands on a pen and paper and wrote Taxi Driver to chronicle his own experience as a depressed and lonely cab driver, is now entering a new phase in his life following the success of 2017’s First Reformed and the […]
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The Passenger: Jack Nicholson and Michelangelo Antonioni have an identity crisis
Throughout the 70s and 80s, several Hollywood stars collaborated on projects with some of cinema’s biggest auteurs. Most notably, the likes of Robert De Niro – who, fresh off an Oscar win for Raging Bull, decided to fly out to Rome and work with Sergio Leone (who at that point hadn’t directed a movie in […]
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You Were Never Really Here: The Cinema of Lynne Ramsay
If there is one director who knows how to tell difficult and heartbreaking stories by simply hinting at the dramatic beats through the use of moving images, it’s Lynne Ramsay. The Scottish filmmaker spent a good portion of the 21st century telling stories of human struggle and existential angst while simultaneously filling the current cinematic […]
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A Most Wanted Man: Capturing the Hopelessness of Espionage
When we lost Philip Seymour Hoffman, we lost a man who knew how to be human in front of a camera. A man who knew exactly how to give a complete and detailed account of the human condition. His characters never dared to fall into the trap of clichés, never felt diminished by a bad […]
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High Noon: Why We Need Unconventional Heroes
There are movies that make history, and then there are movies that are history. Over the last century, few movies have reflected the era they were made in as vividly as Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon did back in 1952. Upon its initial release, the seemingly simple story of a small town sheriff having to confront […]
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Midnight Run: The Art of Buddy Comedy
What happens when you get an award-winning method actor in De Niro, a timid comedian in Charles Grodin, a young up-and-coming director in Martin Brest and tell them, Go out there and make a really good comedy about a bounty hunter going through a mid-life crisis while chasing a white collar criminal? Well, what happens […]
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